Update: What would a Big Mac cost if McDonald’s doubled pay?

Would you shell out 68 cents more for your Big Mac? (Photo credit: pointnshoot / Flickr)

Update: The story this blog post was based on: “Doubling McDonald’s Salaries Would Cause Your Big Mac To Cost Just 68¢ More” on The Huffington Post was based an faulty data. The Huffington Post says on its site, “The research used as the basis of the story contains significant errors that cast doubts on its claims.”

Original post:

Raising fast food wages to a move livable $15 an hour might not send menu prices through the roof, after all.

Morelix perused the company’s 2012 annual report to find that just 17.1 percent of the chain’s revenue goes to benefits and pay. For every dollar McDonald’s earns, 17 cents pays upward of 500,000 of its workers in the U.S. The study only looked at company-run stories, though, leaving out 80 percent of the chain run by franchisees.

Critics say strikers need to suck it up and be grateful for what they have. Fox News station’s Neil Cavuto dismissed the strikers’ demands as entitled.

“It’s like jobs aren’t enough these days,” he said on the air Tuesday. “They better pay well, or folks just aren’t applying for them at all.”

Cavuto regaled viewers with a story about how he got his first job for $2 an hour and all the free fish he could eat at a fast food joint called Arthur Treacher’s in Danbury, Conn, which sounds all very up-by-your-own-bootstraps American until you adjust for inflation, as Mother Jones points out.

“Cavuto says he made $2 per hour when he was 16, which would have been around late 1974,” the magazine calculated. “That’s $9.47 per hour in today’s dollars — or $.28 per hour more than Washington state’s minimum wage, which is the nation’s highest.”

Then consider that most fast food employees aren’t teenagers trying to earn their keep at some summer job while their parents cover housing and food. The median age of a fast food worker is 28 years old, and many have kids, rent and other expenses to worry about.